We invite you to come for a coffee and listen to the invited artists who will discuss their work, research and ongoing projects with the Rencontres Internationales programming team. This is an informal and ideal opportunity to address the work of the artists in the programme before the screening.

Rencontres Internationales continues with its Focus series, initiated in 2016, inviting the audience to discover, during a dedicated one-hour session, the work and specific research of an artist or an exhibition curator. The guest defines the course of each focus.

For the second Focus in Berlin, we have invited the exhibition curator Berta Sichel.

This focus called "On curating", aims to provide the audience with an overview of various contemporary curatorial practices. It will offer an opportunity to develop a critical point of view as well as to share some of Berta Sichel’s experiences and thoughts on this specific practice. Her experience of the media and her work with artists, in the context of art institutions and as an independent curator, will be the discussion framework. With examples and commentary, this focus will highlight the challenges faced by this plural practice.

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Berta Sichel is a contemporary art curator, art historian, and theorist with extensive knowledge of international artists and art institutions. Since 2014 she is the director of Bureau Phi, an art agency working internationally to produce exhibitions, public, and editorial projects. Bureau Phi has organized exhibitions and editorial projects in Europe, United States, and Latin America. In 2014 was the artistic director for the First Biennial International de Arte Contemporáneo Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
She began her career in New York City where she curated exhibitions for the Sao Paulo International Biennial, the Aperto for the Venice Biennale and for North American museums. She has taught at the Media Studies Department at The New School for Social Research. In 2000 she moved to Spain, where she was appointed the Director of the Department of Media Arts, as well as the Chief Curator for Media Arts, at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, where she was responsible for the establishment of a historical video collection, and curating the media exhibitions and public programs, including commissions and production of performances and concerts. Sichel left the Reina Sofia in 2011 to pursue her own projects, while remaining Curator at Large until March 2013.

UBERMORGEN
Red Coin (Chinese Blood), 2015
Red Coin mining has recently made the People`s Republic of China the world`s largest Bitcoin producer. Mining requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold, copper, diamonds, nickel, rare earth, silver, uranium and zinc are mined from the ground. One of the reasons for the fast growth is the buildout of hydropower in the west of the country. The first petahash mining farms were built in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia where coal was cheap and plentiful, but cheap coal can’t compete with free water and now the farms are migrating en masse towards the west.
uuuuuuuntitled.com/chinesecoin
uuuuuuuntitled.com/chinesecoin/ChineseCoin_Text.pdf
Video & Sound: Mike Huntemann
Commissioned by NEoN (North East of North), 2015
Optimized for Dolby Surround 5.1
# Dolby 5.1 available upon request: officeR@ubermorgen.com #

UBERMORGEN
lizvlx (AT, b. 1973) and Hans Bernhard (CH/USA, b. 1971) are European artists and net.art pioneers. They tenaciously convert code & language and concept & aesthetics into digital objects, software art, net.art, installation, new painting, videos, press-releases and actions. CNN described them as `maverick Austrian business people` during their Vote-Auction action and the New York Times called Google Will Eat Itself `simply brilliant’. Their main influences: Rammstein, Samantha Fox, Guns N’ Roses & Duran Duran, Olanzapine, LSD & Kentucky Fried Chicken`s Coconut Shrimps Deluxe. The have shown their work in major international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, MoMA/PS1, Sydney Biennale, MACBA Barcelona, New Museum New York, SFMoma, ICC Tokyo, Gwangju Biennale and were commissioned by Serpentine Galleries London & Whitney Museum New York. UBERMORGEN currently holds the Professorship for Digital and Net-based Art in the Faculty of Art at the University of Art and Design Offenbach/Frankfurt
http://ubermorgen.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermorgen

Alyona larionova Across Lips

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 11:43 | Royaume-Uni | 2016

Pairing up jazz improvisation with the vastness of big data, Across Lips attempts to decode what it means to tell a story for a digital age. Framed by the gradual and comprehensive expansion of the Internet Archive, this film questions what it means to truly believe in something.

Alyona Larionova (b. 1988 Moscow) earned her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2013 and her BA in Photography from LCC in 2010. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at HOW Art Museum in Wenzhou, II Moscow Biennial of Young Art, National Center for Contemporary Arts Moscow, Temnikova & Kasela, and Bermondsey Project Space, among others. The artist has recently premiered her latest film at Picturehouse cinema, supported by Outpost Norwich and Ed Atkins; the film was also nominated for Tenderflix 2016 Award, organised by Tenderpixel London.

Katleen vermeir, Ronny Heiremans Masquerade

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 51:1 | Belgique | 2015

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Ubermorgen examines a virtual currency, of which China has become one of the main producers. This new currency attains rates nearing those of goods like gold or silver, its production requiring huge natural resources. Alyona Larionova tries to decode what a narrative is in the digital age, and reflects on belief systems. She creates tension between order and chaos, technology and mass data, faced with an impending disaster. Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans observe human relations, which have become pure transactions, in an ironic critic of the cultural and investment funds sectors. Art, like finance, is a belief system. The Maison Des Artistes, defined like a work of art, becomes a financial instrument.

Panic Book is both a set of drawings and an animated video. The drawings are made on book pages. The books often come from the family library, and deal with the political and philosophical thought of Yugoslav socialism. The pages then become part of a reconstruction of cult sequences of Hitchcock movies: scenes of fear, panic or flight.
This rereading of the legacy of Tito`s socialism that ended in a “cul de sac” is close to power-up mechanisms and disaster announcements used by the master of suspense

Born in 1987, Nikolic lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts (painting department) , currently in PhD, he received several prizes for drawing and a special prize for his mural installations. Initiator of U10 Art Space, a self-managed artist space, he was exhibited since 2007 in numerous solo and group shows in Serbia and abroad. In 2015 he was invited to Basel (List), Vienna (Parallel) and Paris (Cultural Center of Serbia). He is currently on show at Caixa Forum in Barcelona, Spain and Kunslerhaus in Vienna, Austria

Milutin gubash Language Lesson

Vidéo | 0 | couleur | 1:42 | Serbia | 2016

Language Lesson (2016) intercuts two tracking shots -- a shaky handheld approach to the Yugoslav dictator’s mausoleum, with a smooth following shot of my Yugoslav mother walking through her Canadian apartment corridor, and entering the small living quarters in which she will almost certainly pass the remainder of her days. If she’s not exactly an exile, she’s certainly cut off from her past, her friends, the sites where she grew up and feels most familiar, or so we may imagine just upon hearing her accent, which comes in the form of voiceover, where she gives us a little lesson in speaking Serbian. She says things like, “This is here, this is mine, this is shit, I don’t like this…”, alternating in English, then Serbian (subtitled in French). The thoughts expressed range from neutral, to (perhaps) happy, to disappointed or displeased. As she walks, her thoughts seem to change. Similarly, a change happens on the approach to the mausoleum, which at first appears lavish, in sparkling marble. We don’t know at first where we are, other than in a cemetery, the burial site of someone very esteemed, wealthy, important. After short bursts of the approach, we eventually see the name of Tito, which perhaps causes us to reflect on opulence in a land where there was seldom plenty. The camera drops quickly to the ground, where we apprehend a struggle between a colony of ants, which crawl in and out of the cracks in the marble base of the crypt, each fighting for the corpse of a fly. Notions of sacrifice and fellowship in the common pursuit of attaining a progressive, egalitarian social order, rapidly give way to an each-for-their-own, eat-or-be-eaten state of affairs.

In Vesna At the Monument (2016), a humble middle aged woman appears on the site of a dilapidated, in-the-middle-of-nowhere monument, erected likely in the time when she was youthful and at her most optimistic. The monument was commissioned in order to commemorate the heroic actions of common citizens in their struggle against fascism, and desire to promote and participate in a progressive, utopic state. She shuffles past the monument, and sits to smoke a cigarette. Off screen, a voice is heard, asking her questions such as what is the meaning of this place, this monument, this moment. She does not answer, as though she does not hear the question, even while acknowledging the camera, and the voice itself. It could, one supposes, be the voice of the cameraman or director, a voice in the subject’s own head, perhaps the voice of the monument itself, trying to ascertain the meaning of itself in this day and age. It gets no reply, and eventually (perhaps fed up with the question), she simply leaves, with the interlocutor left in his own uncertainty. The video seems to reject or deny a past, while expressing grave uncertainty to the future.

In Amsterdam, there once was a zoo, lions, elephants, people and Nazis. The elephants, who never forget, tell the story to the young lions.
During the Second World War, the story goes, eighteen Jews hid above the lions’ cages. The Nazis, who loved the zoo, cared about the lions and bought them the best meat, usually lamb. The old lions couldn’t eat all they were given, so they left some of it to their new “roommates” – for three years.

Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron’s collaborative work creates links between film, visual arts and theatre. At the center is the individual person as part of a human community, oscillating between resignation and hope.
Karolina Markiewicz studied political science, philosophy and theatre and works as a film and theatre director. Pascal Piron studied visual arts and works as an artist and film director. Both work as teachers.
Their cooperation started in 2013, with an exhibition for Aica Luxembourg entitled Everybody should have the right to die in an expensive car. In 2014, they made a first documentary called Les Formidables, which tells the story of five young migrants in Luxembourg. In 2014, they found the video blog kulturstruktur.com.
In 2015 they worked on the project Philoktet, which includes the homonymous play by Heiner Müller and an exhibition relating the Greek tragedy to Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. At the same time they released their second documentary Mos Stellarium, produced by Tarantula and supported by Film Fund Luxembourg. Part of this project is the installation of Mos Stellarium, which offers different parts of the movie simultaneously, thus giving a non-linear reading of the film.
Their current work includes a video series entitled Side-effects of reality. It consists in a number of short films and video installations. Our reality is a vague and imprecise thing, hardly accessible. The core idea of Side-effects of Reality is to push this inaccessible reality to a poetic level, thus creating through video and text a new image of reality. This image is not the same as its content, it has its own mythology, and by this offers a different take on understanding our reality.
Sometimes we have to invent a new vocabulary to tell the truth.

Born in 1974 in Göttingen, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin. Between 1996 and 1998 he studies photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld. In 1998 he transfers to the HGB Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig and graduates from Astrid Kleins’ class in 2002, followed by a master in 2005. In the same year he receives the Kunstpreis der Böttcherstrasse in Bremen. In 2006 he wins the German competition at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen as well as the Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff-Stipendium. Wedemeyer exhibits at the Moscow Biennial in 2005 and at the Berlin Biennial in 2006. In 2008 he participates in Skulptur Projekte Münster. Solo exhibitions include Kölnischer Kunstverein and MoMA PS1, New York, in 2006, the Barbican Art Centre London in 2009 and the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2011. He participates in documenta 13 in 2012.

Christo doherty, Aryan Kaganof Lamentation/Klaaglied

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 18:0 | Afrique du sud | 2015

Blackface in a film about a secret war
Experimental SA documentary challenges hidden memories of a faraway and forgotten fight
Blackface and South Africa’s secret border war are exposed and explored in a poignant and troubling
new film by Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof, which was shown in Cape Town and Joburg (South Africa) for the first time in June 2016.
For 23 years from 1967 to 1989, young white men were conscripted to kill and die for apartheid during a
long deadly war on the border of Namibia and Angola. In 2011, Doherty presented his ground-breaking BOS exhibition of constructed miniature models and blackfaced conscript portraits based on the rare photographs leaked from the conflict zone, often at great risk to the photographers at the time.
Described by its directors as an ‘experimental psychic documentary’, Lamentation is a filmic response to Doherty`s BOS exhibition of physical suffering,traumatic memory and the border war.
Doherty and Kaganof’s 18-minute film is a formal meditation on the traumatic memory of an illegal war in which tens of thousands of young white South African men were forced to participate and uncounted numbers of black Namibians were killed or injured.
It is a contemporary attempt to explore one of the unexamined aspects of apartheid’s military misadventures, a conflict which killed and injured unknown numbers of civilians and well as soldiers and left a generation of men and women traumatised on both sides of the conflict.
The film makers are not afraid to challenge and to shock. And they stress that the film is about memories and understanding for all participants and victims of the border war, not only SA soldiers.
Lamentation’s delicate musical score, by leading South African composer Michael Blake, accompanies
the camera’s slow movement up the uniformed chest of a solemn white model with painted black face, cutting to scan a miniature scene showing the mutilated corpse of a black Namibian civilian alongside an armoured SA military vehicle.
Throughout the film, the disconcerting and shocking imagery is presented through an insistently choreographed interplay of cinematography and sound design.
“We know this is difficult material, but interpreted and constructed images in art are an important way
to reflect on a war which we don’t think South Africa has fully dealt with,” Doherty says. “Many white
men, including myself, firmly shut the door on their army days, yet the SADF was a dark formative
experience which we need to expose and understand.”
White soldiers: black faces
The filmmakers’ portrayal of white men in brown army uniform with black faces sparked controversy in South Africa, but the use of this make-up was a survival mechanism in the war.
The blackface device in the film and in BOS is based on the combat body paint used as camouflage in the Angolan bush by apartheid’s soldiers, ironically known to the white troops as ‘black is beautiful’.
“White faces painted black are currently taboo, but were very much part of a conscripted white soldier’s
experience during South Africa’s war in Namibia and Angola,” Doherty says.
The photographs in BOS, and now Lamentation, use re-enacted representations of this wartime practice, together with miniature reconstructions of scenes of battle and violence, to probe the psychological and ethical transformation of young men who joined in an involuntary battle against a
hidden enemy.
Beautiful music: origins of a difficult film
The film emerged through Doherty and film-maker Aryan Kaganof`s mutual involvement with the hauntingly beautiful music by South African composer Michael Blake, Tombeau de Mosoeu Moerane(2011) for soprano birbyne and 5-track (or 2-track) tape.
Written in homage to the little-known South African black composer Mosoeu Moerane, the film score features Lithuanian clarinet virtuoso Darius Klysis playing the birbyne, a simple keyless wooden wind
instrument.
The conclusion to the film is underscored by an extract from another composition by Michael Blake, his String Quartet No 1, performed by The Fitzwilliam String Quartet.
Cinematographer Eran Tahor’s beautifully choreographed and achingly-slow camera movements match the cadences of Blake`s music and provide a powerful visual sense of the isolated and estranging experience of South Africa’s war on a distant and dangerous border.
The editing and sound design by Aryan Kaganof bring together the music and the cinematography with
strands of found audio, including a voice softly singing fragments of "Die Stem van Suid Afrika", the old National Anthem.

Christo Doherty
Christo is Associate Professor of Digital Arts in the Wits School of Arts at Wits University. He is a
photographer and artist with a keen interest in the visual representation of conflict and trauma. He was
conscripted into the apartheid army at the age of 17.
Aryan Kaganof
Aryan Kaganof is a South African film maker, novelist, poet and fine artist. His extensive filmography includes Threnody for the Victims of Marikana, Decolonising Wits, Western 4.33, and Nicola’s First Orgasm. Aryan left SA aged 19 to avoid conscription into the apartheid army.

In his animation, Nemanja Nikolic proposes a reflection of Tito’s legacy, from drawings on books in the family library, books on the philosophical thought and politics of Yugoslavian socialism. The pages filmed revive scenes of fear, panic, and escape taken from Hitchcock’s films. In ‘Language Lesson’, Milutin Gubash superimposes a Serbian lesson given by his mother on images of Tito’s grave in Belgrade. In ‘Vesna At the Monument’, a woman walks the length of a monument erected during his youth, celebrating the fight of the people against fascism and the ideal of a progressive state. Pascal Piron and Karolina Markiewicz evoke the story of Jews who were hidden in a zoo for three years during the Second World War. Aslan Gaisumov reconstructs the moment of escaping with his relatives from Grozny where there was a war on in 1995. In ‘People of No Consequence’, he gathers survivors of the deportation of Chechen people to Central Asia 72 years ago. Clemens Von Wedemeyer assembles images of horses, filmed by a cavalry captain during the Second World War, between 1938 and 1942, examining pictorial spaces and the subjective camera at war. Christo Doherty and Aryan Kaganof direct a film about a secret war of the Apartheid regime. For over 23 years, from 1967 to 1989, tens of thousands of white soldiers were sent to the borders of Namibia and Angola to kill and die. The white soldiers covered their faces with black to conceal themselves.

A voice-over tells the story of a sailor that dreams of a homeland he has never had; day after day the sailor constructs his new native land shaping it to his imagination. Inspired by Fernado Pessoa`s static drama "The Mariner" the video deals with the notion of what each of us addresses as home and foreign and at the same time with issues related to language and its translation.
Playing with the perception of who is watching, confusing it and mixing it, whilst images of landscapes trick the eyes of the viewer creating shadow play illusions, the female voice speaks Na`vi, an invented language artificially created upon commission for the movie Avatar.
Like a second voice, the subtitles suggest a relation established among words, images and imagination.

Giovanni Giaretta (Padua 1983) currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
After graduating in Design and Production of Visual Arts at the
University IUAV of Venice, he took part in a number of residency
programs including: Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris in
2010; and most recently De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
Giaretta’s work has been featured in exhibitions in Italy and abroad
at diverse institutions and galleries such as: La Criée (Rennes, FR);
Tegenboschvanvreden, (Amsterdam, NL); Foundation Botin (Santander,
SP); Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart,
(Rochechouart, FR); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, (Torino, IT);
and Motive Gallery (Amsterdam, NL). His films have been shown at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Rotterdam, NL) and the T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival (Wroclaw, PL), among other festivals and screenings.
His actual research is focusing on the relationship between perception
and alteration during the night time. For the last year, to carry on
such research Giaretta has been working as night porter in an hotel in
Amsterdam.
From 2015, he is also working as co-teacher at the Salzburg International Summer Academy.

Giovanni Giaretta tells the story of a sailor dreaming of a homeland that he never had. Yoann Lelong films moments of improvisation, rehearsal and hesitation that make up a work. Music by Les Gordon is superimposed over the movements of hip-hop dancers choreographed by Anne Nguye. Two worlds complement one another in a new and unique form. (La) Horde explores a contemplative situation where different aspects of jumpstyle - dance originating in mainstream hardcore – are staged and reinterpreted. The camera follows dancers and a singer in an abandoned former steel mill. The different performers wander around before reuniting to perform without an audience. In an unspecified period and country, Bogdan Smith produces a story around 21 year old Yevgueni, a young astronaut and technician who dreams of travelling in space. During the particularly critical launch of a manned Soyuz spacecraft, Yevgueni suddenly loses consciousness, causing loss of contact with the crew in orbit, and the explosion of the spacecraft in space. Haunted by this catastrophe, he gradually loses his grip on reality, taken over by this trauma haunting him.

Skull Island is an ongoing series of video works, lectures and installations that use the fictional island from the various versions of King Kong as analogies for hypothetical image environments. Each island provides a means of manifesting and examining an introspective image space that reflects the sociopolitical contexts of its audience. The cultural and technological developments displayed within each version of the film define relative positions from which the viewer can question their current perceived surroundings. After being captured by a camera crew within this otherwise inaccessible territory, Kong escapes into the physical context to confront the audience with their internal fears and shared cultural constructs.

Graham Kelly (b. 1982, Ayr, Scotland) is an artist and writer based in Rotterdam and Brussels.
Previous exhibitions, screenings and lectures include: Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), Intermedia (Glasgow), Generator Projects (Dundee), Kino der Kunst (Munich), TENT (Rotterdam), EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam) and the 2016 Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2009 with a Masters in Research and with a Masters in Fine Art in 2014 from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. He was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht between 2015 and 2016 and is the recipient of the Mondriaan Fonds Werkbijdrage Jong Talent and Centrum Beeldende Kunst O&O subsidies and a Scottish Arts Council Creative and Professional Development Award.

Dan ward Performance

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 18:0 | Royaume-Uni | 2015

A single day spent in a motion-capture studio documenting actors, a director and technical crew provide the subject matter for this film.
Using a cliché B-movie script, the studio Audiomotion test workflow patterns to standardise and improve the production process (e.g. adjusting cameras and monitors, rehearsing with equipment, transferring data etc.) The actor’s movements are recorded during the scene, followed by minute facial gestures (aided with face paint), and finally edited as 3D models.
We see how technique and dialogue must change to avoid disrupting the motion-capture technology, how the actors choose their expressions (stylised, but with an emphasis on naturalism), what other jobs the actors may have, and how standards or ideal gestures are created via these technical methods.

Dan Ward is a filmmaker based in London.

Joshua mosley Jeu de Paume

Animation | hdv | couleur | 2:52 | USA | 2014

Jeu de Paume depicts a court tennis match at the Château de Fontainebleau, France, set in 1907. The stop-motion animation, filmed with a robotic hand-held camera, reflects the asymmetrical design of the court and the irregular rhythm of the game.

Joshua Mosley is Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.F.A. and B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Joshua is a recipient of fellowships including the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. His work has exhibited and screened at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bruce Museum, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Donald Young Gallery, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Damir ocko The Third Degree

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 10:30 | Croatie | 2015

The Third Degree is a single scene film exploring a close-ups of skin scars resulting from third degree burns filmed through an installation of broken mirrors reflecting the crew and the whole background process while filming the scars, thus integrating the subject of the camera with the process of filming itself. The Third Degree was made as a response to questions that emerged due the particularly violent way the previous film TK was filmed.
The term "Third Degree" has an ambiguous meaning in the English language: it is a way to classify a burn of a very strong degree, but it can also signify a process of extorting a confession under violence. Set in motion by such violent interpretations and perspectives, film tries to critically, yet poetically, cut through the collective haze that blurs relations between means of production, control and the subject itself, giving rise to alternative methods of understanding as a reflection determined at the same time by social, political and aesthetic parameters.

Damir Očko was born in 1977 in Zagreb, where he lives and works. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Očko has exhibited on solo exhibitions at DAZIBAO, Montreal, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien in Graz and Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in Dublin among other places.
He participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally with institutions such as, MUDAM in Luxembourg, FRAC le Plateau, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, Kunsthalle Vienna, among others.
His works can be found in the collections of Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation and CNAP – Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris or at the MUDAM in Luxembourg.
Damir Očko was representing Croatia in the 56th Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition "Studies on Shivering / The Third Degree.

Sebastian diaz morales The Lost Object

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 13:29 | Pays-Bas | 2016

The Lost Object is the final video in a trilogy that examines the complex mechanisms of how we perceive the constructed nature of reality—and how this construction is performed, both in the realm our imagination and the one of film. As curator Cuauhtémoc Medina notes in a recent monograph dedicated to Diaz Morales’ work, the artist approaches film as a “factory of simulacra,” a conceptual thread that carries throughout his trilogy, which began with Insight (2012) and was followed by Suspension (2014).
A slow, steady shot travels into the set of The Lost Object, accompanied by the din of a whirring film reel that seems to methodically introduce the viewer into a world of artifice: a soundstage containing the set of a curiously dated, yet nonetheless anonymous room. The scenario slowly begins to unravel, disarticulating both the language and apparatus of filmmaking. Following Jean Baudrillard’s notion that the world has disappeared behind its own representation and therefore its impossible to return to it, The Lost Object proposes a new world in which fiction and reality merge into one single element. In this universe, fiction is autonomous and auto-generates itself.

Based on images taken in an airport, the symbol of a global society, Peter Downsbrough examines the act of filming and the structuring of language in moving images. Graham Kelly examines cultural and technological developments in contemporary image. Based on different film versions of ‘King Kong’, he highlights the preponderant importance of the socio-political context in which the public receives these images. Dan Ward documents the shooting of motion capture. Everything in the studio is made to standardise the implementation process. Joshua Mosley uses animation to recreate a game of real tennis that took place at the Château de Fontainebleau, in 1907. With skilled editing, he resumes the idiosyncratic moments of hesitation, the different degrees of concentration and what he calls ‘human consciousness’. Damir Ocko explores the mechanism of a film set where third degree burns are filmed. In English the term ‘third degree’ means both a very bad burn and a confession obtained through torture. Sebastian Diaz Morales examines the mechanisms through which we perceive the constructed nature of reality. Fiction and reality merge; fiction appears to self-generate.